Ellie Searl Stories

9/15/2011

GATEKEEPERS

THEME: DREAM ON

Dreams are illustrations. . .from the book your soul is writing about you. ~ Marsha Norman

They guard the entrance to creativity, allowing the select few—those who pass muster—to enter. Not the riff raff. Not the wannabees who try to worm through the slats, those sad, misguided dilettantes who think their work shows merit. They’re gatekeepers, and they prevent the unskilled culture-defacers from assailing the public with crap.

If it weren’t for that cadre of connoisseurs assessing, ranking, and restocking the Aesthetic Empire, the eating, viewing, and reading public wouldn’t know what to eat, view, or read.

Take food. Without the Big Food Houses, like Poach Board and Pot Watch, anyone and his second cousin could open a restaurant. BFHs put aspiring restaurateurs through a series of trial kitchens where chefs prepare innovative fare for taste testing, after which the Palate Committee flavor-edits the dishes, taking, say, six to ten months, eventually returning the recipes with recommended modifications that the would-be culinarian must integrate into menu options before contracts are finalized.

The Big Food House then spends the next year and a half designing and building the restaurant, and, once ready for business, collects all restaurant proceeds, forwarding to the owner maybe eight percent of the profits in quarterly installments.

Then there’s art. Painters, sculptors, photographers. Those quirky right-brainers who think that producing art is a way of life. Without art gatekeepers there’d be oils and watercolors and photographs and sculptures on display all over the place—museums, galleries, stores, street corners, gardens, offices.

The Big Art Houses, such as Design Depository and Statue Statutorium, keep the art world under control. They stash submissions for review in massive warehouses, where they remain until the Talent Assessment Guild determines their attributes. The evaluation process is simple. The appraisal committee members, made up of the administrative assistant and night janitor, stand in front of each work of art, and throw Rock, Paper, Scissors. A coin toss determines who represents the artist.

Rock over Scissors means the piece is rejected, or if small enough, displayed over the urinal in the men’s room.

Paper-over-Rock means the art is returned to the artist for revision—with a note:

“Yo! Leonardo! My Man! – Everyone on the same side of a table? Hello.”

Now these artists, if they want a second chance with TAG, must edit their pieces according to where the dart lands on the revision wheel—Color Within the Lines, Smooth Out the Dots, Quit with the Umbrellas, Straighten the Watch, Add Velvet—anything to show they’ve at least parked at an art school.

Scissors-over-Paper means the piece is a keeper, and contracts are signed. Once a piece of art is chosen for public view, it’s put aside until there are upwards of twenty additional Scissors-over-Paper wins by the same artist – enough for a full gallery open. Could take two to five years, during which time the artist waits tables for a Pot Watch Restaurant.

Then there are writers. Good writers. Bad writers. Mediocre writers. Doesn’t matter. They all want to be published. Somewhere. But especially by the Big Book Houses, like Reticent Review and Predictable Press. Ask any writer, and he or she will say that publication is a primary goal. It’s imperative to have reading gatekeepers. Otherwise, just anybody could write and publish a book. And if just anybody could write and publish a book, there’d be books everywhere. We all know that the reading public lacks wordsmith sophistication. They read books indiscriminately, ignoring taste, creativity, style, and quotation marks on the wrong side of the period.

It’s essential that gatekeepers guard the reading public from piles of word hash plopped beside gourmet prose at any reader’s table. How dare a writer expect to publish a book without it first being prepared, plated, and presented to judges who can attest to the quality and doneness of a piece of writing?

The BBHs judge a book by its cover. Therefore, it helps if an aspiring writer has a close working relationship with a Scissors over Paper art winner. Once the cover passes muster, the interior text is evaluated—there must be a plethora of words with more than six syllables, properly embedded fonts, and an appropriate dedication to one’s mother.

The publishing world has evolved to the extent that anyone—Grandma Jones, Aunt Agnes, Cousin Earl—can publish a book. But self-publishers have no gatekeepers. Self-published books aren’t legitimate. They’re written by amateurs. Ask the experts. Self-published authors use bad grammar, change tenses, and incorporate too many adjectives and adverbs. Self-published books are puerile, shallow, and undeveloped. They’re not properly edited, they’re boring, they’re tedious— a scourge on the market.

It doesn’t matter that someone’s father, a gentleman in his early 90s, wants to publish a series of stories and see them in print before he dies. Or that a Mid-west bride wants to write her story of how she met a retired NYC police officer while playing on-line Scrabble, fell in love, and got married. Or that a crime writer, who after two and a half years of Big House rejections, decided to publish his book himself. It doesn’t matter that some, perhaps many, writers have a dream of seeing their words, their stories, their labor, their book, stand on a shelf between Shakespeare and Steinbeck. It doesn’t matter that, like restaurateurs and artists, they want to see their hard work come to fruition and become a product they can hold in their hands – or give to their children—or share with their friends.

What’s that you say? Not all self-published books are full of crap? There are well-written, self-published books by excellent authors? That it's not the self-publishing in and of itself that qualifies a book for the back porch, not good enough for the grown-up table, not worthy of the good china? And that just as establishing one’s own restaurant doesn't mean bad food and installing one’s own gallery doesn't mean bad art, self-publishing one's own book doesn't mean a bad read? How radical.

If that's the case, then here's to all writers who dream of seeing their books on the coffee table or shining through the small screen of an e-reader, go for it. Game on! Don’t be intimidated by the elitism of gatekeepers.

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Serendipity Authors - Ellie and Carolyn

Ellie Searl writes of human nature - the ordinary and the eccentric - getting to the heart of life’s yearnings, idiosyncrasies, and ambiguities. The splendor of the Adirondack Mountains and Lake Champlain seeped into her being, as did the rhythms of small-town life. Her slice-of-life storytelling draws inspiration from rich experiences with diverse cultures, quirky personalities, and unusual encounters while living, working, and raising a family in New York, Delaware, Vermont, Ontario, Quebec, Ohio, and Illinois. Ellie’s stories reflect her passion for justice, equality, and freedom of the spirit. She taught the art of writing to Chicagoland middle-schoolers, whose curiosity, energy, and enthusiasm for life gave her insight into the dreams of the sometimes disregarded. When not writing, Ellie designs and formats books. She also creates and manages websites and blogs.

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Carolyn B Healyis a therapist-turned-writer who has invested hundreds of hours listening to people as they rewrite their life stories. While her interests include serious things like grief, resilience and transformative change, her vantage point allows her to address them with insight and a certain dark humor. A lifelong Chicagoan, she grew up the only child of a single mom, which fueled her curiosity about how other people live, and strengthened her backbone. She has been a columnist for her local newspaper and is writing a book on finding the hidden gifts in grieving.